Category Archives: origami

Years ago, we had a visitor from Japan who gave us a kusudama flower she had been discreetly making during her stay here. It was simply beautiful. Over a period of several months, she had been quietly cutting, folding and assembling pieces of newspaper in her room whenever she had some spare time. That meant folding 60 petals, assembled into twelve flowers, to create a ball-like shape referred to as kusudama. She also added a touch of watercolour paint to the edges, using one of those cool Japanese water brushes. You can see a photo of the flower at the end of this post.

This project involves making just one component with 5 petals, as pictured above. However, if you’re feeling inspired…

Legend says that anyone who folds a thousand paper cranes will be granted one wish. It’s a beautiful idea which a young Japanese girl named Sasaki Sadako hoped to achieve. Sasaki was an infant at the time of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, and developed leukemia as a result of her exposure to radiation. At the age of eleven, she began making a senbazuru ( a thousand paper cranes), wishing for her recovery from leukemia. As time went on, however, she began to wish for world peace instead. While she died at the age of twelve, her message was not forgotten. The Children’s Peace Memorial in Hiroshima commemorates the child victims of this bombing, and every year, thousands of origami cranes are sent to Hiroshima by children from all over the world.

The urge to decorate is at an all time high, and less is more is not everyone’s mantra. Neither is good taste. So let’s all take a deep breath, calmly walk past those cars with red nose antler combos, and find solace in the fact that it will soon be over. It’s a safe bet that a few flapping birds will not elicit any intense, negative feelings. Besides, they’ll be safely inside your home.

For those who can’t remember grade 6 math (and we are a rather large group), a hexahedron is a six sided three dimensional geometric figure. The snap part refers to the very cool final step in folding, which brings this lovely shape to life. Now if only it had a chocolate inside.

Bats have always lived in dark and mysterious environments, and long been associated with witches and vampires. This legendary creature remains a popular symbol of Halloween, and therefore an essential part of this month’s fun. The spooky little bat pictured above can easily be made and enjoyed by the youngest of merrymakers.

This origami fish was shown earlier in my Japanese Paper Collages post, and here are the instructions on how to make it. This design involves some cutting, which purists consider to be a form of sacrilege. I recommend you embrace your inner rebel, make those incisions, and enjoy the possibilities they bring.

Collage means to glue, and comes from the French word coller. It involves the use of just about any material which is assembled on a surface. While the possibilities are endless, in this project, focus is on the use of Japanese paper. A detailed history of these papers can be found here.